Through Silicon Vias (TSV) technology was adopted in production a few years ago for MEMS and CMOS Image Sensors (CIS). Driven by consumer applications such as smartphones and tablets, this market is expected to continue to grow over the next several years. For high-end memories, 2015 will be the turning point for 3D adoption. Standards have now been established, therefore the industry will be ready to enter in high-volume manufacturing. Wide I/Os and logic-on-logic will follow, most probably around 2016-2017.

Emerging applications, such as photonics based on interposer, are also being developed for future products. However, their market entrance is most likely not going to happen before 2019-2020. Figure1 illustrates the market adoption and growth for the next 5 years; additional information and details per application are available in the report (revenue, wspy, units 2013-2019, etc.).

3D technology and specifically Through Silicon Via processing offer different options for processing wafers. As a result, different business models have been developed. Today, mainly two TSV approaches are being commonly used: via last and via middle. IDMs and wafer foundries are the main adopters of via middle manufacturing for memories and logic dies. They integrate interconnections between the front and back end of the line structures, offering a full device integration.